John Williams of Shadowstats.com contends there is 12 trillion in liquid dollar assets held outside the U.S. Williams says it is only a matter of time before all the Fed money printing will "trigger a sell-off . . . and that will provide the early start of the hyperinflation." You think the U.S. is better off today than it was in the last meltdown? Not according to Williams, he thinks, ". . . things have gotten a lot worse." Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with economist John Williams.

The importance of Hong Kong as a channel for Chinese gold imports continues to diminish with nearly half of Swiss June gold exports going direct to the mainland.

As we have noted here before, there has been an increasing trend for China to import gold directly via its mainland ports of entry rather than via Hong Kong, which makes Hong Kong to China gold export data less and less relevant. So headlines like the recent one from Bloomberg: China’s gold buying from HK drops to lowest in a year and the accompanying ‘analysis’, which puts it all down to lack of mainland China demand, have to be seen in context and as potentially misleading ...

Eric Sprott: “I don’t think there is any doubt about the world economy rolling over. China has been the major buyer of all products and they’re not holding it together here. They’ve experienced a market crash already, with these huge amounts of debts that the Chinese have taken. The Chinese have created more debt than anybody. Their debt outstanding has increased remarkably….

Rob Arnott: “Commodities have crashed. Emerging-market bonds have cratered. Emerging-market stocks have had a grinding 4 1/2-year bear market. TIPS are down. High-yield bonds are down. So pretty much everything outside of mainstream stocks is flat to down over the last 30 months.

Mainstream Media Propaganda Ramps Up As The World Begins To Unravel

So when the talking heads on TV are talking about ‘New high, new high, new high. Isn’t this wonderful?,’ what they are talking about is the one and only market that is going up, which is mainstream stocks. ...

With the price of gold and silver tumbling recently, today legendary Pierre Lassonde told King World News that a spectacular turn in the gold is coming and China and India will be the key. Lassonde is arguably the greatest company builder in the history of the mining sector. He is past president of Newmont Mining, former chairman of the World Gold Council and current chairman of Franco Nevada.

Lassonde is one of the wealthiest, most respected individuals in the gold world, and as always King World News would like to thank him for sharing his wisdom with our global readers during this critical period in these markets.

Pierre Lassonde: “We are in the dog days of summer, but I believe prices are more likely to be higher in September than what we are seeing today. However, if the U.S. dollar is going to stay on a tear, it will be very difficult for the gold market to work its way higher….

Retail demand in China is now jumping as it is in India, but it has still to reflect in London’s demand. The price rise in London was mainly due to a weaker dollar. But in both India and China premiums are rising with sales doubling in Hong Kong. Retail demand in these countries needs to feed through to Shanghai before we see this demand damage the ‘bear raid’.

One cannot know if the bears will continue their raids or how much gold they have to orchestrate their raids. The triggering of ‘stop loss’ protections has happened but ...

The Shanghai Gold Exchange is the only major official physical gold trading market in the world. All trades on the exchange are settled with the exchange of ownership on physical gold bullion. Paper future contracts do not trade on the SGE. In contrast, trading occurs on the LBMA and Comex in paper gold. The Comex is de facto a 99.999% paper gold exchange for which the percentage metal backing the paper traded is minuscule. The LBMA has been rapidly “catching up” to the Comex in this regard, although on a percentage basis the LBMA experiences a higher amount physical gold exchanged than the Comex.

Because of the way in which the SGE functions, gold withdrawn from the SGE measures the true demand for gold in China in a given time period. All gold – except for the gold purchased by the Peoples Bank of China – purchased by any form of end user must pass through the SGE by law. It is for this reason that “withdrawals” represent the most accurate measurement of demand for gold in China – except the Central Bank’s demand. ...

Hal's insight:

This is really fascinating. At some point gold's price will rise in the light of this demand. At least I think so. Sometimes it seems like we have been transported to Bizarro World where left is right and right is down and good is evil.

Richard Russell: "The Fed continues to deny inflation. Yet their denials are now almost a joke, with nearly every conceivable item in daily use rising in price. Furthermore, with the minimum wage rising across the nation, inflation is now starting to accelerate.

Industrials are again above the critical 18,000 level, with the Nasdaq above 5,000 again and flirting with a record high. Are the averages forecasting an economic boom ahead? The Transports continue to deny the good times. The lowly Transports are telling us that something is very wrong. The action of one average alone (Industrials) cannot forecast things to come. The Transports continue to negate the Industrials' forecasts of good times ahead. ...

The recent gold and silver smack down, which was artificial and predatory selling by any measure, was also the occasion of the largest volume ever on the GDX Gold Miners Index on the NYSE. And through continuing abuse of the financial system, more and more productive assets fall into fewer and fewer hands. We can see this growing inequality in our society now as a corrosive influence on the republic.

The government released their monthly CPI report this week. Even though it came in at an annualized rate of 3.6%, they and their mouthpieces in the corporate mainstream media dutifully downplayed the uptrend. They can’t let the plebs know the truth. That might upend their economic recovery storyline and put a crimp into their artificial free money, zero interest rate, stock market rally. If they were to admit inflation is rising, the Fed would be forced to raise rates. That is unacceptable in our rigged .01% economy. There are banker bonuses, CEO stock options, corporate stock buyback earnings per share goals and captured politician elections at stake.

The corporate MSM immediately shifted the focus to the annual CPI figure of 0.1%. That’s right. Your government keepers expect you to believe the prices you pay to live your everyday life have been essentially flat in the last year. Anyone who lives in the real world, not the BLS Bizarro world of models, seasonal adjustments, hedonic adjustments, and substitution adjustments, knows this is a lie. The original concept of CPI was to measure the true cost of maintaining a constant standard of living. It should reflect your true inflation of out of pocket costs to live a daily existence in this country. ...

Hal's insight:

You'll need to click through for the rest of the article. It continues to amaze me that people accept the data coming out of DC and not the data coming out of their bank accounts.

When financial markets crash, they do not do so in a vacuum. There are always patterns, signs and indicators that tell us that something is about to happen. In this article, I am going to share with you four patterns that are happening right now that also happened just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008. These four signs are very strong evidence that a deflationary financial collapse is right around the corner. Instead of the hyperinflationary crisis that so many have warned about, what we are about to experience is a collapse in asset prices, a massive credit crunch and a brief period of absolutely crippling deflation. The response by national governments and global central banks to this horrific financial crisis will cause tremendous inflation down the road, but that comes later. What comes first is a crisis that will initially look a lot like 2008, but will ultimately prove to be much worse. The following are 4 things that are happening right now that indicate that a deflationary financial collapse is imminent…

July 20 (King World News) – Overnight the financial markets were largely uneventful, though that wasn't the case for commodities (more about that below). As for our stock market, the early going saw the indices modestly higher, with the high-priced (i.e., valuation, not absolute), momentum-oriented, "growth-y" sorts of names driving the Nasdaq.

The early strength led to a bit more and the Nasdaq gained about 0.5%, with the Dow/S&P lagging until the last hour, when the rally fell apart and the market closed flattish. Away from stocks, green paper was mixed in rather dull trading, oil lost a percent, fixed income was lower, but, as I noted, the real action was in the commodity complex….

Richard Russell: "As subscribers know, I am rooting for the US to come out of this complex situation alive and better than ever. The Greek catastrophe is giving way to the Chinese tragedy. The Chinese stock market is falling apart. The question now is whether China’s bear market will envelope the world.

As I write an hour before the close, the US market continues to hold up. The Industrials are 600 points above the critical 17,000 level and the Transports are almost 300 points above the 8,000 level. The Nasdaq is holding above 5,000. Gold is down 1.7 to 1095.2 and silver is up 2 cents to 14.63. ...

Can you feel the panic in the air? CNN Money’s Fear & Greed Index measures the amount of fear in the financial world on a scale from 0 to 100. The closer it is to zero, the higher the level of fear. Last Monday, the index was sitting at a reading of 36. As I write this article, it has fallen to 7. The financial turmoil which began last week is threatening to turn into an avalanche. On Sunday night, we witnessed the second largest one day stock market collapse in China ever, and this pushed stocks all over the planet into the red. Meanwhile, the twin blades of an emerging market currency crisis and a commodity price crash are chewing up economies that are dependent on the export of natural resources all over the globe. For a long time, I have been warning about what would happen in the second half of 2015, and now it is here. The following is a summary of the financial carnage that we have seen over the past 24 hours…

Was the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis the equivalent of a foreshock — an earthquake that, at the time, seemed like the Big One until, that is, the real and substantially larger earthquake brings massively more destruction days or weeks later?

Based on what has transpired in recent years, it would certainly seem that the Global Financial Crisis was just a taste of what’s to come.

The world is more deeply indebted today than it was back then. Too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger today. And central bankers for the world’s key countries have little firepower left to confront a new financial crisis.

We are now officially on our own. Buy gold!

Hal's insight:

Click through for the full post and chart showing countries and their Debt-to-GDP.

One of the big questions which the gold sector may be asking is what is the low gold price doing to Chinese demand. Have the Chinese become disillusioned with gold given they piled in so strongly in 2013 when Shanghai Gold Exchange withdrawals for the year hit a massive record 2,181 tonnes, but the gold price has largely been on a downwards path ever since.

We had already seen the beginnings of a pick up in Chinese demand, as expressed by SGE withdrawals, when they hit well over 60 tonnes for the week ended July 10th (see Huge latest week SGE gold withdrawal figure – 62 tonnes) all at a time when seasonality suggests Chinese demand should actually be at its lowest. ...

The Central Planners who thought that buying shares to prop up the stock bubble was an excellent fix are about to find out the true meaning of toil and trouble. The actual line from Shakespeare's Macbeth is double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble but for the purposes of analyzing what happens when authorities prop up market bubbles by directly buying assets, bubble, bubble, toil and trouble is also appropriate. China's authorities seem to have chanted Shakespeare's magical incantation nonstop this year, as the Shenzhen and other Chinese stock market indices have more than doubled. This chart illustrates what the Chinese authorities were aiming for: a bubble that just keeps expanding and never pops:

Echo bubbles aren't followed by a third bubble. Speculative bubbles that burst are often followed by an echo bubble, as many participants continue to believe that the crash was only a temporary setback. The U.S. housing market is experiencing a classic echo bubble. Exhibit A is the Case-Shiller Housing Index for the San Francisco region, which has surged back to levels reached at the top of the first bubble:

Hal's insight:

Click through for the full charts and rest of the post. It's a must read.

President Obama this week nominated Kathryn Dominguez for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. She’s a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald Ford School of Public Policy. If the Senate approves her, it would add another academic to the Fed’s policy- making arm, which — as you might have noticed — hasn’t been very effective in recent years in either predicting what the economy is going to do or fixing the economy after it behaves in an unpredictable manner. Like all professors, Dominguez has lots of books, charts and theories, I’m sure. All of those are great when standing in front of students. The trouble is, the Fed’s actions aren’t purely academic.

Hal's insight:

Click over for the full article.

I clipped the above from another section of the Crudele's article where he talks about "The hidden truth behind quarterly earnings reports."

China is engineering yet another mini-boom. Credit is picking up again. The Communist Party has helpfully outlawed falling equity prices.Economic growth will almost certainly accelerate over the next few months, giving global commodity markets a brief reprieve.Yet the underlying picture in China is going from bad to worse. Robin Brooks at Goldman Sachs estimates that capital outflows topped $224bn in the second quarter, a level "beyond anything seen historically".The Chinese central bank (PBOC) is being forced to run down the country's foreign reserves to defend the yuan. This intervention is becoming chronic. The volume is rising. Mr Brooks calculates that the authorities sold $48bn of bonds between March and June. ...

Gerald Celente: “Because the markets are rigged. That’s not a conspiracy theory; that’s a fact. We already know that LIBOR and forex are both rigged and we also know there have been investigations about the rigging of the gold market. And it’s not in the best interest of central banks, who are printing trillions of dollars of fiat money in order to prop up global equity markets, to see their currencies devalued….

Best-selling author Nomi Prins says the only thing propping up the system is money printing. The tip of the iceberg was the Greek debt crisis. Prins says, “Before it happened, there was a lot of concern at the central bank level. That wasn’t really discussed very much in the press . . . but I believe behind the scenes there were a lot of fearful conversations about the financial system, not just the relationship of the euro and Greece politically, which was a part of it, but you don’t want any chips to fall off your table. Anything could open the door for a run on liquidity (cash), which is also why I talk about what individuals should do more and more now is try to preserve their own liquidity and to take more cash out of the markets or out of banks to just have on the side before this period of volatility, before we have the actual crash. This is a tenuous situation. I am afraid of things that look like a bail-in up to the level of a bail-in.”

Seldom has the media been more bearish on gold’s prospects, and this will undoubtedly present itself in a further retreat from gold derivatives and gold stocks.

China seems to be being fingered for the latest gold price crash, but should it be? A truly Machiavellian argument might be that the crash was perpetrated by those elements seen as anti-gold seeking to gain maximum advantage at a time when gold was already under pressure. And by undertaking some of the activity on the Shanghai markets seeking either to try and apportion the blame to Chinese hedge funds, but also to dampen the appetites of the gold purchasing Chinese people and institutions who may be seen as standing in the way of a major manipulated gold price downturn.

What is the evidence here? The gold price crash was actually initiated in New York with an enormous futures sale – which then continued in Shanghai with ...

A client of mine, a jeweler just called. His refiner called him – looking to buy gold or silver. The refiner has very tight stock. My client buys “shots” to melt and builds into rings etc. His refiner volunteered info on the selling this am – says the system is manipulated, which shocked the client only in that it was openly admitted. When my client’s refiner needs product you know there is a shortage. This is the first time in 10 years this refiner said there were shortages. – A colleague and friend of mine who manages high net worth accounts

GATA was the first in this country to warn, based on a historically very reliable source from London, that there would be acute shortages of gold and silver this fall at refiners in Europe. A few weeks later the mint ...

Hal's insight:

Click through for the rest. If true, the snap back could be violent. I certainly think that the manipulation in the paper markets is by design of a select few. It's all gone way past the point that I thought the illusion could be sustained. So I have no idea how long it will continue.

Powerful speculators have launched an unprecedented attack on the world gold market, driving prices to a five-year low as commodities wilt and the US Federal Reserve prepares to tighten monetary policy.

Spot prices slumped by more than 4pc to $1,086 an ounce in overnight trading after anonymous funds sold 57 tonnes of gold in Shanghai and New York, choosing the moment of minimum market liquidity in what appears to have been a synchronized strike intended to smash confidence.

The move came after China’s central bank dismayed "gold bugs" by revealing that the country’s bullion reserves stand at just 1,658 tonnes, far lower than widely assumed. While holdings have risen 60pc since the last update in 2009, they are still a fraction of China’s total $3.7 trillion foreign exchange reserves.

Ross Norman, a veteran gold analyst at brokers Sharps Pixley, said sellers dumped 7,600 contracts covering 24 tonnes on the Globex exchange in New York in a two-minute span after it opened late on Sunday night. ...

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